Ungrind LOTRO!

[grenifk]

I would just like to first start off by stating that, I can completely understand where the majority of the community is coming from in wanting a massive overhaul in what is needed for us to acquire in order to "finish" / "complete" our characters. However in my opinion I don't think there is anything wrong with the current game/system.




In the past, it has been very easy for players to have multiple characters and for all of these characters to be very well geared, in legendary items, gear and jewelry. At level 75, there was the Tower of Orthanc, anyone could get the armour just by Pugging a Tier1 run which was relatively easy, and the jewellry was rather easy to get especially after the introduction of the Great River region. At level 85, a simialr occurance, for the first week or so, First Age symbols mistakenly dropped in T1 version of the Erebor raids, and after completing all the raids on T1, also relatively easy, you could barter for the "lesser" version of the armour, which really held no difference against the "greater" versions. Some people even continued to use the Hytbold set (Yes, do you remember Hytbold? - You remember how long of a grind that took? There was less QQ about that than there has been since we have been at Level 100..). At level 95, you could easily craft everything for the best end-gear equipment, and then just farm BB's for your potential gold jewellry.


However, at lv100 - for which we have now been at for well over a year, turbine has reshaped the game we know. It is no longer easy/possible to have, I'd say more than 3-4 "Well" geared characters, and even less possible to have more than 2-3 completely geared characters. Honestly, I think this is Turbines aim - it means people have to focus more on a single, or two characters, properly, rather than every player being able to pick up and play every class. People should be recognised for how good they are at one-class, not how many geared up alts they have and "can" play. And this applies directly to myself, at lv95 I used to have a well-geared character of each class. I now only play 2 of those 9 characters, because it is too difficult to play the others and have them all "complete", but there is "Nothing" wrong with that at all. For too long, we as a community, have played the game under the "Now" factor. The only difficult part about the game generally used to be waiting for a certain jewellry piece to drop in a raid, or waiting for a First Age Symbol once they had been released; and once you had your symbol, it was relatively easy to, within under an hour complete your Legendary Item, providing you had saved up before the update, which is what most end-game players had done. The game wasn't difficult, everything was relatively easy to obtain, jewellry and armour, once you had the tactics for the raids down, Legendary items if you had just done a bit of pre-planning.


However, the majority of the player base are now in an absolute uproar, because they can't complete their Legendary Items overnight. Oh, boo-hoo. You actually have to work for something? The idea of the Legendary Item system is that, these are weapons that "grow" in power as you do... The more you play, the more they will grow, because you have the option to upgrade them as you can until at last they reach the maximum. The satisfaction of finally reaching the max imbued level on a legendary item is wonderful and feels like a job well done. (The majority of you could take the easy route you know, a lot of legacies don't need to be upgraded past lv35, if you are going to complain this much about it).


We have had no "end-game" content for a while, no substantial raids, and until recently no good PvP action. So, they gave us a grindy system to play with, that seperated the actual players from the casual ones. A casual player can still be good, however they should never be as good as a player who has spent a lot more time and effort on the game. The only way a casual player can now do this, is if they pay for it. And we all know how much that costs.. However turbine are finally listening to their player base, they have revamped PvP and things are a "bit" more balanced, and we are finally getting a new raid!


So, if after reading this post - you still want to QQ about the grind, then go ahead. But in my honest opinion, there is nothing wrong with it.

May i just ask you if you if the only reason you like this grind is to stand "above" others (casual players)? I mean you need to run 1 instance over and over and over again just to equipt 1 character properly (for 2 LIs only, not at least 4 as most classes need to fulill it's role + DPS LI), and all this with the same character same skill, no diversity in runs.

Back then I liked the idea of running a raid while playing a different roles, 1 time healer, next time DPS or tank. It was 1 raid as it is now, but at least I had much more diversity.

As for standing above others we got a world first titles, so in case you like to do that use your brain and finish new raids first. Much better than this mindless grind IMO.

And yes, I understand your point... If you want to properly gear/play all of your alts its unthinkable. In my honest opinion I think its better to have players, with 2-3 characters, extremely well geared, and who have a very good knowledge of the class because they've been forced to play it so much to gear it up. Rather than having 8,9,10 well-ish geared alts and not really knowing what you're doing on any of them.

I don't think the current system encourages people to play their class well, since if you by any chance didn't notice a usefulness of a skill (or misread the tooltip in traits tree) you'll be punished, because it will most probably take another 40 Scrolls of empowerment to change a LI so you'd start using new skill. This happened to me and I didn't even bother changing it, thus still not playing 1 char well.

Over the past several months we have been reading the feedback from players that in some aspects of the game, the “grind” can be a little daunting, especially for those players who have multiple alternate characters they want to use. Based on that feedback we have decided to make some adjustments to the cost for Scrolls of Empowerment. The changes listed below will be in Update 17.2 which will go live later this month.

New Scroll of Empowerment Costs
Marks: 2541
Medallions: 293
Stars of Merit: 90
Morgul Crests: 3
Dol Amroth Silver Pieces: 20
Gold and Silver DA Tokens: 7G - 20S
East Gondor Silver Pieces: 15
Gift-giver's Brands: 10
Builder's Tokens: 4
Commendations: 1000

This is just one of the things the team has in store for Update 17.2 and beyond. This change along with many others we are looking into, should help alleviate that feeling that some players have about the “grindy” feel to certain aspects of the game.

Thanks for the heads up, looking foreward for new datacenter and U17.2 after